Nature – Page 14 – The Inner Frame

Old Man’s Cave (Ohio VI)

The most prominent feature of Hocking Hill’s State Park is Old Man’s Cave, reportedly the home of a hermit who lived there in the late 17th century. If not for the visitors, this place comes close to my ideal of a place for contemplation.

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The recess cave itself is very open, like a balcony, and unsuitable for permanent shelter. This is where we stop, free our mind of ourselves, and let the raw landscape take its effect.

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Another view is downstream, towards the bridge. This is the place to contemplate decisions. Three paths meet here. So one has a threefold choice: remain in the cave, or cross the bridge, and then continue either left or right. We will talk about the two latter options next week.

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From the bridge itself, one has the view onto a serene waterfall. This is the place to find focus.

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Finally, if we decide to leave, there is always the look back, turning presence into memory.

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Moss

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When it’s cold and cloudy outside, it’s time for a little introspection.The pictures here were taken with Laowa’s 2.5-5X Ultra Macro Lens, at or near the maximal magnification. DSC 5757

Focussing gets hairy, literally. What you see here are mosses, with some morning dew. Below is another variety.

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All this is in reality just a few millimeters across. This makes it hard to look for motives, because when you are standing up, you can’t tell what is at your feet.

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Below is an algae. The fine hairy threads are quite something up close.

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The problem with this perspective is: If you have seen that much, you want to see more.

The Personal Cave (Ohio V)

Part of Hocking Hills State Park is Rock House, with two short trails and one main feature, a preview of which you can see en miniature below:

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A cave from the outside can be a foreboding place. Do we dare to enter?

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The pattern of a cave per se doesn’t appear in Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, but there are a Child’s Cave and Secret Place, which relate to it.

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We can uncover the secret of a place only by having the courage to step into it. This is like entering somebody’s private space: When inside, we see the world from a new perspective.

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After a while, the darkness dissipates, and we feel simultaneously protected and protecting.

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After leaving a cave, something has changed. We will not be afraid anymore.

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Chance Visit (Ohio II)

Sometimes one needs a bit of luck and the right introduction to be admitted to a place.

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My second stop through Ohio was supposed to be John Bryan State Park, but my GPS told me at some point to leave the road. Obedient as I am I did, and ended up at a closed gate for the youth camp ground. When I started walking to explore where I actually was, I met Robert with his two dogs. We bumped elbows, and he explained to me the energy of the springs at this place, pointing vaguely in a direction where I should walk.

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That turned out to be cross country for a few minutes, until I hit the well established trail system of Glen Hellen Nature Preserve, which I might have missed entirely had I found John Bryan State Park.

It’s indeed a curious place. Up above is a burial mound, and below the remnants of a bridge, maybe indicating that some chasms shouldn’t be crossed. The stubborn among us will keep trying.

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And it is indeed a place with many springs. The most iconic is Yellow Spring, whose orange-yellow color is due to large amounts of iron.

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The color persists for a while, causing ghostly reflections.

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Other springs feed small waterfalls. Four of them are named on the map, but there are more.

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The one below I discovered accidentally, by curiously stepping off the path. I was not the first.

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Spring Happiness

It’s time for my (almost) yearly Snow Trillium post.

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They are a little early this year, and more abundant than usual.

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I can again confirm the existence of a red-veined variation:

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But, oh happiness — here is a Snow Quadrillium:

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It is the third quadrillium I have found, and my first snow quadrillium. Here it is again from an angled perspective:

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Coal and Gold (Columbia Mine Preserve III)

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After two slightly misleading posts about a facility (inside and outside) near the Columbia Mine Preserve, the time has come to visit the actual place.

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Large open spaces (either prairies or lakes) allow to look far into the distance in all directions.

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It conveys an almost paradoxical state of mind: Being small and unimportant in this vast landscape, but also (subjectively) being at the center of it.

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Being there in the late afternoon gives the opportunity to experience another contrast. Just before the wintry gray turns into the black of the night, the sun makes one last effort, just before it hits the horizon.

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Then, for a short moment, the black and the gold coexist, and the limiting horizons become an illusion.

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Thawing

After the temperatures finally dropped to proper levels for January, it was time for another serendipity walk in the lightly frozen landscape.

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Usually I know when I have taken a decent photo. This time, I was not sure. When the warming sun came out, the reflections of the light and the doubly layered images of ice and ground beneath created unusual opportunities.

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Thawing is a violent process. This has never been made as visceral as in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, in the scene where the visitor thaws.

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There, it’s the likeness of the alien that frightens. Here, the familiar shapes of leaves become alien when superposed with the fragile patterns of the ice that still covers them.

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There is a strange esthetic appeal in this violence, a desire to explode, and come to life.

Not yet. It’s January still.

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Acceptance

This morning I decided to replay the game Still Live that consists of walking around and taking pictures of things on the ground as they are. It is an exercise in acceptance.

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It was a crisp morning, nobody was out there that early on the first day of the new year.

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This time I made it even harder, by reducing everything to black and white, to dark and light.

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Maybe this modification of the concrete into something abstract is an escape to avoid comprehension.

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But by hiding the obvious, either the structural core becomes visible, or the underlying noise.

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Everything depends on what we want to see.

Despite (Across VI)

This last in the series of Across posts returns to the Hole-in-the-Wall Rings Trail in the Mojave National Preserve. Today we try a different format:

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